Thursday, October 04, 2012

Haskell Exchange next Wednesday

The Haskell Exchange 2012 is happening all day next Wednesday, October 10th, in London. There is still time to register, and with the discount code HASKELLX-2012-TE1 you save £50, making it £175. This event is very much about learning how people use Haskell, and how you can use Haskell. It isn't academics giving their plans for the future, or perfecting the small details of the language, it is all about what you can do today.

I've been helping Skills Matter organise the program since the start of this year. The final list of speakers is Simon Peyton Jones, Simon Marlow, Lennart Augustsson, Duncan Coutts, Blake Rain and Rob Harrop. You can find details of their talks on the main page. I'm very happy with both the variety and quality of the speakers. It includes people who were there at the beginning of lazy functional languages and also people actively making their living developing things for clients with Haskell.

I've seen four of these speakers talk many times before, and they are always fun and informative. The two speakers who might be less familiar to some in the Haskell community are talking about topics which sound particularly interesting:

Blake Rain will be talking about Yesod, one of the three Haskell web frameworks. I've read the excellent documentation on Yesod, but I've never seen the overview. I ran an ASP web development company many years ago, and want to see how I could have avoided the problems of untyped development. I want to see how the ideas behind Haskell web frameworks work in practice, with real end-users who care far more about the shade of blue than type safe URL's.

Rob Harrop will be talking about integrating Haskell components into an existing system via message passing over the network. I hear more and more people structuring complex systems as separate processes that talk to each other with messaging interfaces. Once you have process boundaries, then using a different language for each piece becomes easy. Translating 1 million lines of code to Haskell isn't usually an option, but prototyping one new process might be - this approach seems like a great gateway for Haskell.

I look forward to seeing some of you there! Register now (discount code HASKELLX-2012-TE1).